As the placement of realistic advertisements in video games becomes more popular and acceptable in the gaming community, more and more video games are beginning to utilize video game advertisements as a viable source of revenue. Currently, most video games that employ realistic advertisements typically utilize a static advertising technique that involves placing each advertisement in one site throughout game play. As such, the location of the advertisement cannot change or move and other advertisements cannot take its place. Thus, although there may be multiple advertisements in one game, each advertisement can only occupy a single location throughout the entire game. This is undesirable because it lacks the ability to maximize the effect of the advertisement on the gamer.
One way to increase the exposure and effectiveness of the advertisement on the gamer is to utilize real-time dynamic advertising techniques which allow for the targeting of advertisements to specific gamers or groups of gamers. These dynamic advertising techniques allow multiple advertisements from different advertisers to be rotated through one or more sites during game play. Moreover, these dynamic advertising techniques allow for different content types, such as Billboard, Logo, Video, Audio and Beacons, to be used to display advertisements to the gamer. As a background, billboard type content is content that is displayed on a billboard type sign within the gaming environment, logo type content is content that is displayed as a poster like sign within the gaming environment, video type content is content that is displayed as a video within the gaming environment, audio type content is content that is broadcasted as sound within the gaming environment and beacon type content is content that is displayed as a static advertisement within the gaming environment. Cell or sites that are configured for each of these content types is capable of receiving and displaying multiple advertisements throughout the game for display or transmission to the gamer. For example, a racing game may have a billboard display advertising one product as the racing car passes the billboard a first time. However, subsequent times the race car goes around the curve and passes the billboard, entirely different advertisements may be displayed. Thus, dynamic advertising not only enhances the reality of the game's content, it maximizes the revenue generating capability of the software product by generating multiple revenue streams, as opposed to one revenue stream generated using static advertising techniques.
Unfortunately however, one problem that exists with dynamic advertising involves the ability to efficiently track, store and report upon application specific data when the type of information that is to be tracked is defined by the application developers and/or game publishers. One way to address this problem (i.e. how to transmit, aggregate, and report on data of which the system has no prior knowledge) is to used XML, which transmits generic type-less data in a standard format. However, this is an extremely inefficient endeavor for two reasons. First, the protocol required to transmit XML data is not compact, thus resulting in network traffic this is very large in size. Second, current back-end systems would have to implement an XML parser to retrieve the generic data. Unfortunately, this is a relatively slow process and would cause each of the servers to be able to handle fewer client connections than desired.